David Wright has now played in 20 games this year, in which he’s driven in four runs and hasn’t hit a single home run. Dating back to last year’s All Star break, a period covering 87 games, he’s hit six home runs and driven in 46; in the 87 games before last year’s All Star break, those numbers were 20 and 74, respectively. So what, exactly, is wrong with Wright? Nothing, really. Nothing at all.

The premise that Wright is in some sort of extended slump dating back to last year is, to begin with, just not true. Wright may have only hit six home runs in the second half last year, but his overall batting line was .305 BA/.375 OBA/.469 SLG, which is very good, and his batting line was only that low because he had a poor August, in which he hit .245/.313/.392. Wright may not have been hitting home runs, but he has a broad array of offensive strengths, and he was hitting for average, cracking doubles, drawing walks, and even running the bases well, stealing nine bags in 11 attempts. He is not mired in some sort of four-month slump dating back to last year. The reality is that he just didn’t hit many home runs in the second half last year, and he’s in a slump to open this year — two separate phenomena.

Even granting this, it’s unusual for a hitter with his power to go this long without a home run, one might reason, and something must therefore be wrong. This makes enough sense, but it’s completely untrue. At the end of the Mets’ game yesterday, Wright stood in the fine company of Mark Teixeira and Alfonso Soriano, both of whom have much more home run power than he does, and neither of whom has knocked one out of the park. Derrek Lee got his first yesterday. Wright may not even be the best young third baseman in his own division to have opened the year short on power—Washington’s Ryan Zimmerman had a big zero next to his name on the scoreboard for this year’s first 18 games.

If that doesn’t ease your mind at all, consider that Travis Hafner and David Ortiz, arguably the two best pure power hitters in baseball over the last few years, have each endured similar season-opening slumps recently. Hafner went 19 games without a bomb in 2005, and Ortiz went 24 without one in 2003; each ended up ranking third in his league in slugging average that year. And if these examples still don’t allay your fears, consider this. I looked at every seasonopening streak of at least 19 games without a home run that took place this decade, using www.baseball-reference.com’sexcellent data-slicing tools and found not one example of a previously well-regarded power hitter who went through such a streak and subsequently proved to have simply lost his power stroke.

None of this means that Wright will simply snap out of it, of course. He may have been affected by a mysterious, power-sapping virus let loose by Braves fans working at Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The big contract he signed last year may have robbed him of his desire. Who knows? Precedent, though, suggests that he’s simply cold, as happens to all ballplayers, and that given enough time his skills and talents will assert themselves and all will be well.

It isn’t just precedent that makes me shrug my shoulders at Wright’s slump; there’s also the significant fact that his swing and approach seem consistent and basically fine. He’s drawing his walks, fouling off tough pitches in key at-bats, and hasn’t fallen into the habits of the truly afflicted hitter, like changing his stance every time he comes up to the plate or flailing at pitches he can’t possibly hit in an attempt to see if a break in routine will bring new results. If you want to look for a quirk in the way he’s hitting this year that might point to an adjustment he needs to make, it’s that he isn’t hitting the ball the other way on the ground or pulling it in the air. Even that shouldn’t be too big a problem — he’s too talented and mature a hitter, on a team too well-managed and too stocked with veterans who can help with this sort of thing, to think that he can’t fix whatever it is he’s doing wrong.

Ballplayers slump. Wright never really has. He came up as a fully formed All Star and continued to improve for two years. This set expectations very high, perhaps unrealistically so, but he remains a ballplayer — fallible and prone to insecurity, self-doubt, bad luck, and the league making adjustments to exploit holes in his game, just like everyone else. There’s no reason to think that he’ll do anything but hit a torrid stretch at some point as mysteriously as he’s hit on his cold stretch, at which point the improvement will be credited to something like keeping his hands back, opening up his hips, the intervention of a high school batting coach, reading a column like this, a UFO flying over his house, or something else of that sort. If you’re inclined, you could look at it as regression to the mean, or the intervention of fate into the workings of baseball, or something that just happens.

Whatever you do, don’t worry about David Wright, at least not yet. If he has no home runs and 12 RBI at this year’s All Star break, it will be time to rethink the issue. For now, just watch how a great young player deals with the first extended period of adversity in what’s been an exceptionally charmed career so far; it will tell us every bit as much about his future, and that of his team, as the way he’s dealt with success.

tmarchman@nysun.com